The frozen Alaskan trip down to New York

Well, a long long silence has finally been broken. Unfortunately Alaska is still the frozen North as far as internet connections are concerned so while I was doing updates on the machine I wasn’t able to update the site. Then the inevitable happened and my laptop, the victim of long journeys on rutted roads and even longer days of being locked up in the car with temperatures in the 100’s, decided to give out. I wasn’t totally surprised in retrospect as it is a bit old and but it’s always a shock when you hit the power button, see a few lights flicker and then… nothing. So for a few weeks I have been out of contact but this week I have finally been able to get it working (with occasional crashes) however much of the updates I had done have been lost.

So, the last few weeks, including Alaska have been lost to posterity but never mind, I have been able to retrieve the photo’s from the camera and they are posted here. Suffice to say, Alaska was all I expected it to be as Joanne and I spent three weeks traveling from Anchorage to Denali to Fairbanks to Anchorage to Seward to Kenai to Soldotna and finally back to Anchorage again. The weather was typically Alaskan we were told with a few cloudy days, a few sunny days and about four days where we had every type of rain imaginable – from that mist that seems to stick rather than wet to downpours where the rain hits the ground so hard the water bounces back up to soak you. Still, as it was about the only real bad weather I’ve encountered in the whole 5 and a half months I really can’t complain.

I think the highlight of the Alaska trip and one of the highlights of the whole trip was the three days in Denali where we got to see all kind of wildlife including Grizzlies, Caribou, Dall Sheep and a few other species. In Seward we saw Porpoise, Sea Otters, Seals, Fin Whales and Bald Eagles as well as being able to do some Sea Kayaking and get up close to a few glaciers.

Since I left Alaska I drove the 2000 miles to Calgary in about 8 days. This journey was quite a bit slower than the trip up to Fairbanks via Vancouver but the car was definitely feeling the strain after being asked to drive across the Rockies for the second time in a month. Actually I’m surprised at how well the car has held up. I suspect when the designers of the Ford Windstar put the car together they saw it as a cross-town runabout rather than cross country voyager but it has held together pretty well and with the milometer currently hovering around 108,000 miles it’s still running – I mean, it’s definitely feeling the strain but still it should get me home without too much of a problem. I think I have now logged about 24,000 miles in the car which is almost equivalent to the circumference of the Earth so you won’t be surprised to hear I’m starting to get a bit tired with this driving lark. Once I got to Calgary I think I started to seriously run out of steam, especially as I was at that point more than halfway home.

Speaking of which, I’m now in Chicago and only 900 miles from New York. I think I should be back in the Big Apple in about 10 days as I am now definitely getting to the end of my reserves in both finance and energy. For the rest of the trip I’m planning to head east toward Detroit and then one last loop into Canada via Toronto and Montreal before heading home.